Books I'm Reading: The Imagery of Surrealism

In the past year, my reading has been focused on art history. My interest in art history is nothing new, but this spate of reading was set off by a show at Modern Art West, in the town of Sonoma, back in September of 2022 focused on female Abstract Expressionist painters working on the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s. Reading about these women (I recommend Ninth St. Women, in particular) led me to reading specifically about Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. Reading about Frankenthaler led me to reading about Motherwell, which led me to reading the anthology of Dadaist writing he edited and that led me to The Imagery of Surrealism (first edition, Syracuse University Press, 1977) by J. H. Matthews, a dense, difficult read that required concentration and perseverance to get through.  

I suspect that many people think primarily of painting or collage when they think of surrealism, but, as this book makes clear, like dada, surrealism was as much a literary movement as a movement in the visual arts, and, again like dada, true surrealists looked at surrealist imagery (whether verbal or pictorial) as secondary to action, in this case the act of creating while separating the mind from the constraints of convention to tap into what was variously termed "inner need," "the inner model," or sometimes just "desire." Kandinsky, though not a surrealist, called it "inner necessity." Surrealists believed that rational thought was the enemy of the creative impulse and that some means was necessary to bypass rational thought to access the inner model (as a side note, I find it frustrating that it's hard to find practical suggestions as to what that means exactly was or should be). 

As the jacket blurb notes, Matthews "asks why and with what consequences surrealism denies values on which our education in art and literature have taught us to rely." The author points out that because words are our means of articulating our understanding of reality, literary images that defy common sense are particularly confounding and they are at danger of being dismissed as simply nonsensical, while painted or drawn images can be easier to accept if we allow ourselves to hold at bay our instinctive reaction, which is to analyze and attempt to find a rational explanation for what we are seeing based on our everyday experience of the real world. On the other hand, he points out that in painting and drawing, it is easy to fall into hackneyed symbolism, and he accuses Dalí of having done just that. He has high praise for Magritte, Tanguy, and Miró among better known surrealist artists, but the book is remarkable for the wealth of examples it presents by a wide range of lesser known artists, which (again according to the jacket) are mostly from the collection of the author and from other private collections and published in this book for the first time. A challenging read, but worth it if you want to deepen your understanding of surrealist thinking throughout its history, from the 1920s well into the 1960s or 1970s. 

Art I'm Looking At: John Anderson at Paul Mahder Gallery

On the same night as the opening of "Aint Natural" at the Hammerfriar Gallery, Paul Mahder Gallery* opened a retrospective of work by John Anderson (1932-2011). Anderson is a new artist to me, although he appears to have a solid reputation. He was long the assistant of painter Gordon Onslow Ford, early a surrealist but later occupied with depicting inner realms of consciousness and trying to escape from what he seems to have seen as the tyranny of the visual. Ford was mentor to Anderson and Anderson's work shows a similar concern with capturing expressions of inner consciousness.

I'm always suspicious of art that seems to rely heavily on theory or that claims to be entirely spontaneous and unguided. The idea of representing inner consciousness without reference to the visual is an intriguing one, but is it really possible? What does consciousness look like? The surrealists looked to dreams for images of the unconscious, but that approach was inherently contradictory; dream images are recalled images from waking life (which isn't to say surrealism didn't yield some good art). Ford and Anderson apparently wanted to directly depict a world beyond consciousness—Ford emphasizing speed and spontaneity, Anderson taking a more deliberate approach, at times trying to work in a trance-like state.

What does inner consciousness look like according to John Anderson? Inner consciousness appears to be crackling with radiating energy and filled with particles—points, tiny circles, dots, blobs. Read the dots as stars and the images evoke the infinite. Read them as subatomic particles and they evoke the infinitesimal. Much of the appeal of Anderson's work comes from this ambiguity; are we floating in space or are we on Jules Verne's fantastic voyage?

Another ambiguity is created by the way Anderson's visual vocabulary simultaneously evokes physical phenomena on the one hand, living creatures on the other. We see lines radiating from a bright spot and surrounded by a field of dots; rings of increasing size as they move away from a point of apparent origin; wave forms; star clusters; entire galaxies; lines that suggest the tracings of subatomic particles in a particle accelerator; electrostatic charges in a Van de Graaff generator; excited plasma; electron flows. All these images come to mind. Some of the paintings put me in mind of Dr. Frankenstein's lab equipment (or at least the Hollywood depiction of his lab equipment). At the same time, it's easy to see the circles filled with radiating lines as diatoms or pollen grains greatly magnified. That is, much of Anderson's imagery is as suggestive of microscope views of living things as it is of physics experiments. Volvox, an old friend from high school biology class, is here. Cells and their nuclei and fields of protoplasm are here, some with embedded mitochondria and with vacuoles. The double helix of the DNA molecule is here.

The paintings by Anderson in the new Paul Mahder show seem to make abundant reference to the visual—specifically to the visual language of physics and biology. Thus, I wonder how successful Anderson can be said to have been at escaping the conscious, the visual. Perhaps it doesn't matter. I don't belittle the attempt. The process is important, and the art that resulted from years of effort toward achieving a goal (however elusive) is compelling. John Anderson at Paul Mahder Gallery will be on display through June 2015 (the gallery website does not give an end-date in June). Well worth a visit for the John Anderson work and a great deal of other good work in this very large display space.

*Paul Mahder is also in Healdsburg (and quite new, apparently; I discovered it by chance only a couple of weeks ago)—222 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, CA 95448, (707) 473-9150).